Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Workout Results 7/06

I had a four mile run yesterday. I had to run it on the treadmill because of the temps outside. This was a tough run. I think the race on saturday had an impact. I decided that I had wanted to make it an "easy run" day, so figured I would slow down the pace to keep my HR down. Well, my HR just didn't want to stay down. I ended up running at 4.7 mph just to keep it reasonable (in the mid to high 150's). And I really thought that I was going to have to stop around the two mile point. I just didn't have it in me. It was one of those runs where my legs were feeling heavy, but worse yet, I just couldn't get my breathing pattern down right.

But once I hit 2 miles, things started to fall into place. I kept the pace slow. I played around a little with ways to get my HR down. Interestingly enough, a slight difference in where I hold my arms made a big impact on decreasing my HR. I played with it several times. If I kept my arms lower, rather than at a 90 degree angle, my HR dropped anywhere from 5-10 numbers! Keeping them lower seemed to relax my upper body more which I think is what caused the HR to lower. It's definitely something I need to start paying more attention to when I'm running outside. I will be really interested in hearing what they say if they do a form clinic in our training group.

I think another reason my HR may have been up is due to overtraining from the run on saturday. I think my body probably needed a little more time to recover after doing that run, but oh well. Today is a cross training day. I'm going to do weights this evening.